Following on from yesterday’s song about September, here’s U2’s October from the 1981 album of the same name. Bono said of this song:

‘October’…it’s an image. We’ve been through the 60s, a time when things were in full bloom. We had fridges and cars, we sent people to the moon and everyone thought how great mankind was. And now, as we go through the 70s and 80s, it’s a colder time of the year. It’s after the harvest. Trees are stripped bare. You can see things and we finally realize that maybe we aren’t so smart after all, now that there’s millions of unemployed people, now that we used the technology we’ve been blessed with to build bombs for war machines, to build rockets, whatever. So ‘October’ is an ominous word, but it’s also quite lyrical.”

I hope you enjoy my performance – it’s certainly a bit different from the vast majority of songs I’ve played this year!

Today’s piece of music is from the soundtrack to the 2001 film Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet had been planning to commission Michael Nyman to write the score for the film, but while driving with his production assistant he heard a CD of music by Yann Tiersen and immediately bought Tiersen’s entire back catalogue. Soon after Tiersen was commissioned for the soundtrack, using some existing music and some newly composed pieces.

School began again today for our children and this week most of my teacher friends have returned to the classroom, so I thought I Will Survive was a suitable song to play and dedicate to both students and teachers as they begin a new session!

Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic I Will Survive was first released in 1978 and has since been covered countless times. The strings interlude was also used in Robbie Williams Supreme which I played last month.

This song is also dedicated to my (teaching) friend Tess Watson with whom I worked in a previous life, and on whose wonderful granny’s piano I played this many years ago, accompanied by the inimitable Derek Watson on falsetto vocals as far as I remember!

Today’s song is You’re My World by Cilla Black in honour of the singer and presenter who passed away at the weekend. It was originally written as Il Mio Mondo (My World) by Umberto Bindi and Gino Paoli and, despite not being a hit in Italy, it came to the attention of George Martin and he commissioned an English version to be recorded by his protégée, Cilla Black. On its release it went straight to #1 and stayed there for four weeks.

Apparently Elvis Presley was fond of Cilla Black’s recording and kept a copy of it in his personal juke box. When the Beatles visited him in 1965, they had an impromptu jam session with a performance of You’re My World in honour of Presley’s then wife, Priscilla Beaulieu.

Today I’m playing For the Love of a Princess, a version of the main theme from the 1995 film Braveheart in honour of composer James Horner who died earlier this week in a plane crash. The soundtrack from Braveheart earned Horner nominations in the BAFTAs, the Golden Globe and the Oscars. There will be more James Horner music over the coming days: he scored over one hundred films, some of the most well-known cinematic themes ever written.

Today I’m in Belgium at the European Parliament offices with a group of Scottish students who are taking part in the final of the OurEurope competition, organised by SEET. I’ve prerecorded possibly the most famous Belgian song ever written: Jacques Brel’s 1959 classic Ne Me Quitte Pas (“don’t leave me”). It’s a beautiful, haunting melody, and the middle section borrows a theme from Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6 where Brel sings:

Today I’m playing Lionel Richie’s 1984 hit Hello. When this song was suggested to me I was sure I had played it in 2010, but it seems that that wasn’t the case, so here it is! The song has featured in many films, but I think one of the funniest uses of Hello was in the 2013 Australian commercial for beer kegs in which Lionel Richie is discovered inside a man’s fridge…

Staying in Scandinavia for our second Eurovision-themed piano tune, and today I’m playing Emmelie de Forest’s Only Teardrops which won the contest for Denmark in 2013. The song went on to reach number 1 in Denmark, Finland, Greece and Sweden, and reached #15 in the UK charts. It apparently is the 7th most downloaded Eurovision song to date according to the Official Charts Company.

Today I’m playing another song from the musical Miss Saigon. The Movie In My Mind is sung by Gigi and Kim and the other showgirls as they dream of a better life in America. If you’d like to hear more of my Miss Saigon performances, you can listen to the Soundcloud playlist which includes Sun and Moon, Last Night of the World and Why God, Why?